Welcome to the second in my series on alternative to using Shoemoney tools. This time I’m going to show you a free way of finding expired domain names that have valuable backlinks/traffic that you can buy up for cheap and use to your advantage. Shoemoney gives you the domain marketplace for this, essentially a list of domains that his scrapers find that you can then buy the name off. It’s then up to you to decide whether or not you want to purchase the domain.
In my opinion there are a couple of flaws with this. For a start you don’t know what niche the domain you are buying relates to. Relevency is everything! Secondly you can’t check how valuable the links actually are. For example the Domain Marketplace may indicate that a domain has .edu backlinks. Whilst that sounds great it might not be so great if the actual link comes from a domain blacklist on one of the university bulletin boards! You won’t find this out until you’ve paid your money to Shoe.
Now what I was going to do here was show you how to use a couple of websites to extract that same information and find valuable expired domain names. However in reality I wrote a little program for myself. I figured it wouldn’t be too much of a job just to touch it up a bit and let you guys use it so that’s what I’m going to show you how to use.
First of all you can download the Find Good Expired Domains tool using this link. You’ll also need the .net framework version 2 or better to use the software, you can download that from here.
OK. Now that’s done start the program and you’ll be greeted with a nice simple screen. Your first job is to decide what keyword you want in the domain name (see the advantage this has over the domain marketplace already?). Type in the keyword and hit the “Get Domains From Source 1″ button. At this point DO NOT CHECK FOR DOMAIN AVAILABILITY. This causes the program to go off and find domains that have expired at one point or another, they may not be currently expired but we can check for that later.
After a little wait you’ll get a popup telling you how many domains are available. Press Yes to go and get all that extra info about each domain. See if there is any lingering Page Rank, back links, .edu.gov.mil back links, any Alexa traffic etc If there are thousands of results you may want to narrow your search.
Depending on the number of domains this process can take a while. Also note that if you were to check for availability it will take a hell of a lot longer that’s why I recommend not doing it at this point. There is no point checking for a domain being available when it might not be of any value right?
Once it’s finished checking all the domains (or as in my example you get fed up waiting and hit stop) you’re left with a list of domain details. Now I recommend that you order the domains by each column (Links, DMOZ Listing etc etc) and switch tabs at the top to the Check Domains tab.
You should now be able to copy and paste the domain names that are of value into the box on the Check Domains tab. Do that for each column, so for example if there are 11 domains that have some backlinks highlight all those domain names and copy them to the box. Then order by DMOZ listing and do the same for any domains that are in DMOZ. Carry on doing this for each column (domains that have edu links, domains that have some Alexa ranking) and don’t worry about copying the same domain name twice.
Once you’ve got your complete list of domains that have some value you can then go ahead and check each to see if it’s available. On the Check Domains tab hit the “Check Domains” button. The program will go and check each domain to make sure it is 100% available to buy right now. This will take some time, roughly 5-6 seconds per domain.
Now that’s complete you can order them by availability and see if there are any domains worth buying. In my example below the best domain is probably a2zmakemoney.com but with only 4 links would I be bothered to spend $8 a year on it? That’s your call! Of course if I would have left the program to run in the first place I may have found many many much more valuable domains 
It’s also worth noting that just because a domain isn’t currently available doesn’t mean it’s not worth persuing. In my example the domain 101waystomakemoney.com is not available to buy right now BUT if you check the URL you’ll find that no website exists. The owner is doing nothing with it. Who knows, doing a quick whois lookup and contacting the owner might land you with a domain with 287 backlinks and some traffic for only a few dollars!
So that’s all fine and dandy but how do you get value from these domains. The easy approach and the one that the great Shoemoney himself advocates is to simply 301 redirect them on to one of your existing content sites. Those links then get credited to your existing domain. Does this work? Yes it does. When originally writing this program I was checking for Thailand related domains, I found one for an insurance company that had 30-40 links. I 301′d this on to my Thai related site and within 2 weeks was in the top 5 in Google for certain insurance related searches. It’s a ranking that has held for months and brought some nice traffic. An absolute bargain for only $8 a year domain registration!
The other way is to buy the domains to build quality content on. That’s obviously a much longer term game than just forwarding but again that’s upto you to decide!
So that’s how I go about finding valuable expired domains, use, enjoy and let me know how you get on. Now here comes comes the disclaimer:
By all means use my Find Expired Domains tool but please be aware that this is free software. It’s not to be bundled re-packaged in any way and sold. It’s also worth noting that that is a very early release and is bound to have bugs, whilst it shouldn’t cause your computer to burst into flames if it does it’s not my fault! Use it at your own risk. Just one final point, some of the API’s used may have usage limits, for example the Yahoo back links check has a limit of 5,000 checks in any 24 hours. Just keep it in mind.
6 Responses to “How To Find Valuable Expired Domains”
MM
June 1, 2010
tool is great, but most people do not have enough time to do the search and filter every day. If you need to see already filtered list, try ValueDrops.com. It does the filtering for you.
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